Apology
A New Age Meditation
by
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I looked up to the sky. One instant, I saw thick billowy clouds, richly marbled with shadows cast by a brilliant full moon shut away somewhere above. Next instant, my world changed forever. In that singular instant, cloud melted into countless faces of myriad expressions, here enmeshed in towering marble Corinthian columns and exquisitely detailed vases sporting vibrant, impossible arrangements of flowers, and Roman chariots etched in detailed gold sheet, and exotic extraterrestrial beings of unbelievable shapes, and countless other recognizable forms all at once splattered across the sky in precisely interlocking patterns. Next instant, that living tapestry melted away into a thoroughly different mural of images, present there for the moment that it took me to recognize them all and one. Next instant, the images melted again into something new. Then again, and again--naked forms flowing in an outrageously vivid stream. I recognized my bodily sensation as the feeling of watching the countenance in my dream, simultaneously the feeling of fear and the feeling of flight. It seemed but a second later when I remembered time, so I looked back down at my hands and at the half-finished joint between my fingers. Then I looked up at Sam and at Mike, engaged in their self-same talk. "Holy . . ." I jumped down off the fence and looked back up into the sky, where the clouds continued flowing as if an endless river of images, melting into and out of each other, forever new, forever different, yet ever the same clouds. As I watched, entranced, I realized that this was something my body was doing, something my body had been learning how to do for a very long time now, through many different means. Tonight all that learning had come to fruition. The feeling of the vision unfolding in the sky above was precisely the sensation of my body making it happen. I looked back at my friends, still oblivious to what was happening, and I thought it strange how though we stood here on the same street corner this same evening, we stood in separate realities. "Hey guys!" They both turned toward me with casually inquisitive expressions. It felt deliciously ludicrous that I should have to state the very obvious. "I’m seeing," I told them. "I’m seeing all kinds of things in those clouds up there." I turned my eyes back upward. "Every sort of form I can imagine, thousands of forms at once, all interlocking and forming parts of each other, flowing, flowing, like a river, a full roaring river, like looking into the surface of a huge turbulent river, except that the images are so sharp, so perfectly crisp in every detail, all at once, I see them all at once for a moment, and the next moment everything’s changed, but for that moment I recognize every image, every bit of it, and in fact that moment that it lasts is the recognition, the seeing is the feeling of recognition, and the recognition is in me, and all the forms I turn those clouds into are the repertoire of my mind, all the different forms are the terms with which my brain knows how to interpret what I see, so that what I’m seeing are my own thoughts, I’m seeing my own thoughts, because my mind is moving fast enough to see, because I’ve become aware of the subconscious mechanism of perception itself." I turned my eyes back down at them, and they stared at me for the longest moment without comment. Mike buried his hands deep into his pockets then dropped his eyes to the sidewalk. Sam looked at my face but avoided my eyes. Neither of them bothered to look up at the clouds. "And you see, that’s the funny part." I turned my attention back to the flow. "I can stand here and be seeing this incredible vision, and I can describe it to you in the greatest detail, and I can tell you all the ways that endless volumes of religious scripture and philosophical speculation are answered in one moment of seeing this, and I can tell you what an incredible feeling this seeing is--yet you’ll still never understand from all of those words what it is that I’m talking about."
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About the Book
A decade since it was first prompted by his brother’s tragic death, that festering question remains unanswered. Over the past few years, in fact, it has almost faded into oblivion, another thwarted assault by naive youth upon wisdom’s fortress. But lately that question has been bubbling into awareness again, like the ache of a gangrenous sore thoughtlessly left unattended. Amidst the rousing of this and many other dormant questions, there returns a scarcely forgotten excitement, remnant of a forsaken bliss. Seeking remembrance of lost meaning, he has traveled to visit an old college friend, last human link to his glory days of reckless psychedelic questioning. In wanderlust they journey to a distant wilderness, where they upwards grope toward an impending sense of perspective. On an isolated mountaintop far from civilization, memories flow back to him . . . An ecstasy beyond words manifested in a clouded sky . . . An answer glimpsed in the structure of reality . . . An encounter with the Truth that made all other truths self-evident. But as the sun begins to set on that magnificent perspective, he recalls that the place with the brightest light also harbors the deepest shadows. As darkness closes in around them on that lonely outcrop above the world and the chill of night enshrouds their spirits, he remembers why he fled from ecstasy those many years ago, leaving all questions unanswered. Reawakened now as if from a mere moment’s rest, madness resumes its savage disassembly of his world, even as an old familiar terror blocks the path home. True to the platonic meaning of the term, Apology seeks to make clear the grounds for belief in the transcendent significance inherent in all of human existence. Part psychoanalytic memoir, part philosophical dialogue, part travelogue of the world’s spiritual traditions, Apology casts its light across the vast terrain over which humankind has ranged for millennia in quest of a resolution to its existential dilemma. What is the point of living if it only leads to death?
About the Author
Robert Arias is a neurophysiologist who for the past fifteen years has worked toward developing treatments for diseases of the central nervous system. The origin of his interest in the neurosciences can be traced to the series of profound psychedelic experiences that left him, as a young man not quite twenty years of age, teetering on the edge of madness. Seeking to explain away those experiences through the insights that modern science offered into the workings of the brain, he found the mystery only deepening, his hopes for a simple explanation inexorably receding from any purely intellectual reduction. All the while, following a parallel and often complementary tract, he found himself turning with ever more conviction to the world’s ancient spiritual traditions. The line of questioning which was to become his life-long quest has taken him across the vast landscape of human investigation into the nature of reality--from neurophysiology to the search for the historical Jesus, from Buddhist meditation to modern physics, from Muslim political history to the role of psychoactive plants in spiritual revelation--ultimately arriving at a perspective of man in relation to the universe which is, paradoxically, both primordial and postmodern. The composition of his Apology has occupied him for most of the past decade.